Beautiful Statistics

Watch these galleries with barplots, dotcharts, dendrograms...
R graph galleries
especially this:
US-Election Map

Everything counts...
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HU-Library Open Collections Program

For those interested in the social history of the United States I strongly recommend the Open Collections Program of the Harvard University Library, especially the collections "Women Working 1800-1830" and "Immigrations to the United States 1789-1930" (full access and very comfortable):

Women Working, 1800 - 1930 focuses on women's role in the United States economy and provides access to digitized historical, manuscript, and image resources selected from Harvard University's library and museum collections. The collection features approximately 500,000 digitized pages and images including:
* 7,500 pages of manuscripts
* 3,500 books and pamphlets
* 1,200 photographs
Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930, is a web-based collection of selected historical materials from Harvard's libraries, archives, and museums that documents voluntary immigration to the US from the signing of the Constitution to the onset of the Great Depression.

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Dust Bowl Photos

The Dust Bowl was a series of dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands from 1933 to 1939, caused by severe drought conditions coupled with decades of extensive farming ...[from wikipedia]

Dust Bowl Photos
Breathe out,
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Japanese Smileys

You can feel what they mean!
Japanese Smileys
(Sayonara)
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How movies helped change America

Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900–1934. DVD Project Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Film Preservation Board

Prohibition, abortion, unions, atheism, the vote for woman, organized crime, loan sharking, juvenile justice, homelessness, police corruption, immigration – in their first decades movies brought an astonishing range of issues to the screen. [...] Treasures III brings this period to life ...

National Film Preservation Foundation
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Primer

I watched this sci-fi movie yesterday. One of the rare cases a director was able to tell a scifi story without to strain the usual devices like phantastic machines and those foolish explanations about their functionality and the like. The movie hasn't any philosophical content nor intentions (paradoxes about parallel worlds and changing one by doing something in the other, even though the protagonists have to deal with them) and you can simply enjoy their profane and technical dialogs, which cover most of the film.

PRIMER is set in the industrial park/suburban tract-home fringes of an unnamed contemporary city where two young engineers, Abe and Aaron, are members of a small group of men who work by day for a large corporation while conducting extracurricular experiments on their own time in a garage. While tweaking their current project, a device that reduces the apparent mass of any object placed inside it by blocking gravitational pull, they accidentally discover that it has some highly unexpected capabilities--ones that could enable them to do and to have seemingly anything they want. Taking advantage of this unique opportunity is the first challenge they face. Dealing with the consequences is the next.

Primer
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Fundamentalism vs. Evolution

The Creative Archive Pages of the British Film Institute feature

video clips made available for free download to users in the United Kingdom under the innovative Creative Archive Licence, to stimulate creative re-use for non-commercial purposes.

Watch the clip Fundamentalism vs. Evolution which shows a

Head-on train smash staged at 'Monkeyville' to typify clash in U.S.A. between adherents of Bible and followers of Darwin. All America is watching the blaze of conflict between Science and the Scriptures...

Fundamentalism vs. Evolution

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Cesky Sen

I watched this beautiful movie yesterday. There is hope.

Cesky Sen

Yours,
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The Victory of all-embracing Control called a City

Watch this site. Its about the City of the Future according to the weird visions of its inventor.
Victory Cities

It's an entire city all under one roof, to be built and operated by private enterprise alone. There will not be just one, but many such cities throughout the entire world. Boasting no crime, no pollution, and no over-crowding, Victory City is a veritable utopia for those who've grown weary of trying to find solutions to today's urban problems.

One might ask whether this is still a city or yet an asylum for the normally insane. Will the people that might live there (actually no Victory City is existent by now) be called inhabitants or inmates?

Lock your doors,

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hazardous waste

Once the hazardous waste of the future, but still much more beautiful than today's:
Computer History Museum

Use phoneboxes, lined paper and card files.
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Punchcard Art

Watch this:

Do Not Fold, Bend, Spindle or Mutilate: Computer Punch Card Art - Virtual Exhibition

The punch cards in this exhibit were manufactured 35 years ago but were never used. The staff of the Visual Arts Center mailed the cards, or in this case canvases, to a wide selection of artists and cultural figures. Participants were instructed to create artworks using the cards and to return their artistic creations to the VAC. They were free to write, paint, draw, cut, print, and/or do whatever they wished with the punch card in direct contradiction to the traditional dire warning: "Do not fold, bend, spindle or mutilate."

more Science Songs

Here some more Science Songs (available as sheets) by Biophysicist Greg Crowther. Sing along!

more science songs

Science Songs

Today's finding: songs about science. My favourite: It's A Scientific Fact. Downloadable as mp3s.

science songs

...

... unter der Sonne.